Stuff I’ve been up to

Work
I’ve been quite enjoying the new job. New challenges, new environments, new people. Different people make such a difference. In my old team for the most part people weren’t horrible or anything, just not that friendly, socialable or something. The new team everyone gets on really well, shares knowledge, helps out when others are in a bind. It makes working so much more enjoyable. I don’t dread coming to work anymore. Quite an unusual feeling for me. I haven’t felt depressed since I got the new job as well. So guess I wasn’t mental. Just work was bringing me down so much… too much.

Working outside of normal business hours have been different for me though since I’ve never had to do it before. Last Thursday morning I was up at 3.20am and Saturday morning 7am to do work. Luckily thanks to the wonders of computers I was sitting at my desk in my study in my pj’s doing it. So good!

Personal
I got a new ring a couple of weekends back. Well its supposed to be temporary. It looks almost exactly the same except its a little bit chunkier. Its silver instead of white gold and it only cost me $58 from Baku. I probably won’t get another white gold one for a while more because of cost and since I’m trying to save money at the moment. Rozie doesn’t seem that bothered at all just as long as I’ve got something on my finger.

Gaming
One thing that I’ve been getting into since I’ve been in Epping is games. I never really got into video games when I was younger, tending to lean towards messing around with operating systems, applications and networking. I guess I’ve got to a point now where I know enough of that now that I don’t feel I have to messing around with that sort of stuff every minute of the day. So since I got that dirt cheap Dreamcast earlier in the year I’ve been fiending out. Soul Caliber, Gauntlet Legends, Ikaruga, Crazy Taxi, Gundam: Renpou vs. Zeon DX and Border Down have been some personal favourites.

I’ve completely been loving Ikaruga and Border Down though. If you like shoot ’em ups like R-Type and Gradius, then Ikaruga and Border Down you’ll love. So bleedin’ hard, but you want to come back for more and more.

And also I’m now up to my *cough* third Sega Saturn. Time to get some solder, DIL switches and start on those region mods. 😀

Birthday shouts
Happy birthday to Josie and Thommy for last week, who’s birthday’s fall within a day of each other. We popped down to Soul Biscuits for Josie’s birthday last week for a bit of northern soul and some pool. And props to T-bird for the fine spread of grub on Saturday!

Bargain hunting

Went a bit crazy of the weekend with secondhand stuff. On Saturday Rozie and I went over to the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children for a toy and book fair. Pretty megre findings (well OK, it was about 2 or so when we go there). I managed to pickup Foundations of Paradise by Arthur C Clarke and Children of Dune, Dune Messiah, Heretics of Dune and God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert all for the princely sum of $10. Also the next day I went back again. Every Sunday they have a small market selling lots of junk, food, plants and other bits and pieces. Picked up an old Sega Saturn for $20. That one’s going to become my first region and CD-R mod. 🙂

Losing it

On the weekend I had quite a distressing incident happen to me. Actually I don’t think I can ever really remember feeling this distressed. Or completely helpless and powerless to do anything about the situation.

I went to the beach late on Sunday afternoon with BJ to have a quick dip at Bronte Beach. It was cool but the water wasn’t too bad. I dove in the water. Woah, that was fresh. Swam under a wave, surfaced took a couple of strokes on my bodyboard then felt it. I don’t think I’ll ever forget this feeling ever again. The feeling of my wedding ring off my finger and flying into the waves at Bronte.

I completely freaked. I just didn’t know what to do besides freak out. The rip at Bronte is always strong. I knew that. I’ve been hitting this beach since I was teenager. I made a couple of feeble attempts to swim under the waves and try and find it. But fuck, it was past 5pm, the sun was set already so it was getting pretty dark. On top of that my eyesight these days it pretty bad without glasses, so I couldn’t really see that much in focus anyhow.

BJ noticed that I was looking distressed and came to see what was wrong. He helped me make a few more attempts at trying to find it. But I knew it was gone. Perhaps I should have tried harder when it initially came off my finger, but its too late to bother thinking about that. I know I’ll chew myself out over it for years to come like I have time and time again over things so much more insignificant compared to this though.

Well that pretty much finished off the surf early. BJ came back to car with me. I gave Rozie a call and told her the bad news. She took it really well. I think I’m way more bummed about it than she is. I still kills me to think about it and feel that I don’t have it there on my finger.

WordPress 1.2

I’m still finding my way around the latest version of WordPress, but one nice thing that’s been updated is the comment moderation. Previously it was an all or nothing affair, either moderating everything or nothing at all. That didn’t bother me too much, since I don’t get too many comments. But now I can moderate dependant on how many links there are in the comment. Lots of links are usually comment spam, and I’m don’t think any legitimate comments have had any links in them yet. So now anything with no links gets automatically approved. Yay!

The only small annoyance seems to be that Alex King’s WP Since Last Visit plugin is broken. I guess I’ll update when I get around to it.

WordPress gaining props

With the recent changes in the Movable Type licensing, heaps of people have been moving across to the much more free GPLed WordPress blogging software which this blog is running on. A nice article over at Sitepoint linking to some people of interest, one of them stating that they have WordPress up and running in 4 minutes. So what was your problem then, eh Royal? 😉

You’re on the stage now!

Well it seems like over the course of time that my blog seems to have been a good platform for bringing other friends’ “hidden” blogs into public knowledge. I got an email from my friend Joanne today tell me about her blog so I’m assuming she’s ready for the world to know about it! 😉 Welcome to my blogroll. 😆

Joanne’s blog is hosted over at Xanga which is a free blog hosting service which has probably the worst rss feeds I’ve seen anywhere. Well, I guess it is one step up from it being non-existant before. Scrap that, it would probably be better being non-existant…

New job stress

Well some of you may know that I recently got a new job. Its still with the same company, but in a different area doing something close to my heart, Linux. 😀 So I thought I was supposed to be starting my new job on Wednesday. I decided to chat to my now old manager this afternoon just to make sure and everything.

Me: “So, just to make sure. I’m starting this job tomorrow right?”
Old Manager: “Ummm, I thought you were starting today?”
Me: “Uh. OK. I got told by Mr X (temporary manager while old manager was on holidays) that I was starting tomorrow”
O.M.: “OK, let me just check my emails… Hmm. OK. Its says here the 27th, but it doesn’t say whether your finishing or starting on that date. Let me give your new manager a call.”
Me: Wow, vote of confidence. I walked back to my desk while O.M. called my new manager.

Turned out Mr X kinda sorta agreed to me starting or something around that date, but didn’t get back to my new manager. I think. And O.M. had assumed that everything had been sorted out. Not so. Arrgh. Well I start next Tuesday now after my trip to Wellington to visit my good mate Martin. So hopefully I’ll be happy and refreshed after that. I was kind of dreading starting tomorrow anyway. Not sure if its new job jitters, the fact that I haven’t started a new job in almost 5 years or the combination of too much caffeine and the new asthma medication I’m currently on (it does contain pulmicort (sp?) which has made me feel pretty anxious in the past 🙁 ).

SMH.com.au: “Very fat cat seized”

From SMH.com.au:

A German cat weighing six times the normal weight is so fat that it cannot take more than four steps without getting exhausted. Now officials at a Berlin animal shelter are having trouble finding a new owner for six-year-old Mikesch, after it was taken away from his elderly owner.

My Mum’s cat Jesse clocks in at around 10kg and looks pretty similiar to that German cat. He has lost some weight since my Mum got another second cat named Jake though. I’ll have to get some shots of Jesse sitting around the house and put them up. He sits up with his legs spread like he’s watching the footy or something. Most amusing 😆

In tha ‘ping

So now I’m in tha ‘ping (Epping y’all). I feel like I’m slowly being suffocated. I think Mum’s cats are giving the worst asthma and hayfever I’ve had in a long time (probably about 3 years). Mum wants to leave one of her cats here, but I think she’ll have to take both of them with her.

All our stuff is all around the house. Mum was under some sort of strange assumption that Rozie and I didn’t have much stuff. Hah! If you’ve been around to our house before, you’d know that Rozie and I are mad horders. With each subsequent move, we’ve thrown stuff out. But we still have heaps of junk. So now that we’re in Epping, most of our stuff is in boxes in the lounge room, with some other bits here and there. Its driving both of us batty.

Rozie had a dentist appointment in Pazzamatta today, so I went for a wander around while she got poked and prodded. I went down to the trusty Cash Converters and managed to pickup a second-hand Sega Dreamcast for $39.95 baybee. “I must be some sort of neanderfuck!”. And Soul Caliber for $10 to boot with that shiiit. Yeah. There does seem to be some sort of development community around the Dreamcast, but the MAME projects seemed to have died off. Bummer. I’ll have to find out what other games are good on the DC if I can find more for $10.

Trackbacks now working

Since I don’t trackback myself, I never noticed that it wasn’t working. Anyway, I just needed to turn path info processing on for wp-trackback.php. I put this in .htaccess.

<Files "wp-trackback.php">
AcceptPathInfo On
</Files>

Garage Sale

Garage Sale

As part of Rozie and I moving back to the ‘burbs, we’re having a small garage sale this weekend (Saturday to be exact). See your unwanted gifts, books, magazines, retro/vintage/daggy & normal clothes, kids stuff, kitchenware, real junk and fantastic crap! Things start at around 9am and we’ll finish up around 4pm or when we get sick of it. Come on round and say hello!!